Afterword: Conjuncting Astrology and Lettrism, Islam and

Judaism
Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 89-97
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2017.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/655311

Access provided by University of Winnipeg Library (10 Oct 2018 12:58 GMT)
 Afterword
Conjuncting Astrology and Lettrism, Islam and Judaism

M AT T H E W M E LV I N - K O U S H K I
University of South Carolina

Language is a virus from outer space.

—William S. Burroughs

These three papers represent a new turn in the intellectual historiography of

the Islamic world: eschewing both positivism and the equally ideologically
pernicious religionist reaction thereto, both of which have dominated the his-
toriography throughout the twentieth century and to the present, they inves-
tigate their science—Islamic and Judeo-Islamic astrology—with evenhanded
empiricism. Which is to say, they simply ignore the science-magic-religion
triad as the nineteenth-century colonialist-orientalist-vivisectionist construct
it is—for all that that triad still structures history of Islamic science in particu-
lar as an academic field.
As a case in point: in 2016, egregiously, it was still possible to dismiss
astrology out of hand as pseudoscience in specialist surveys of that field, and to
ignore its interpenetration with other mainstream occult sciences like let-
trism, alchemy, and geomancy altogether.1 Such has long since ceased to be
possible in Europeanist historiography of science, which in recent decades
has become overtly occultophilic, especially that treating of the early modern
period; but its Islamicist cognate remains largely positivist and teleologically
Eurocentric to a shocking degree, and equally blatantly occultophobic. There
the reigning (and hence usually implicit) narrative is one in which Arabic

1. This most recently in Stephen P. Blake, Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic
World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which, despite its title, and
like Ahmad Dallal’s Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2010), cites astrology only in merest passing as foil for the “moderniza-
tion” of astronomy by select post-Mongol Muslim thinkers.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Spring 2017)

Copyright 䉷 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

PAGE 89
................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:07 PS
90 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Spring 2017

astrology historically but functioned as cement shoe dragging Arabic astron-

omy, epitome of True Science, down into the miasmic depths of Unscience,
where it finally perished, the valiant efforts of Muslim heroes of science—few
and far between—all notwithstanding.2 The only question is as to whether
Islamic science met its sorry end as late as the sixteenth century or as early as
the eleventh.3 Either way, the civilizational torch was unquestionably passed
from Islamdom to Christendom by the early modern period; and it was the
terminal Islamic addiction to occultism that made Europeans alone the heirs
of Western rationalism, the sole architects of hegemonic scientific modernity.
This narrative, expressly whiggish and Neomanichean, must be exploded;
and our occultophilic authors calmly accomplish just that. To this end, and
despite covering very different times, places, and scholarly communities—
Segol on a series of rabbinical authorities in Iran, Iraq, and Italy from the
sixth to the tenth century, Gardiner on an esotericist Sufi reading community
of thirteenth-century Ifriqiya and Egypt, Şen on the religious-scholarly elites
of sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul—, their articles converge in one
remarkable and perhaps surprising respect: all three marry astrology to lettrism.
As an intellectual historian whose work centers precisely on the latter Neo-
pythagorean science, I must emphasize the unprecedentedness and subver-
siveness of this strategy in the field. I should also note that I too participated
in the 2015 “Characterizing Astrology” conference at the University of Chi-
cago from which the present special issue derives; and I too focused my
analysis on the increasing interdependence of astrology and lettrism, this in
Arabic and Persian classifications of the sciences produced over eight centu-
ries. That all four of us found it empirically necessary to take the same tack,
without conspiring beforehand and hailing from very different academic bai-
liwicks (my own speciality is Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate
world during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), suggests the integrity
of our findings, and indeed marks the beginnings of a new narrative of Islamic
and Judeo-Islamic intellectual history—one featuring lettrism as indispensable
pivot. Due to its unusual length and highly specialized nature, I have pub-
lished the resulting article elsewhere;4 but I will here summarize its central
argument, as it proposes a new macroscopic analytical framework for the

2. For examples see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathemati-

calization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,” Intellectual History
of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 127–99.
3. The first periodization has been advanced by George Saliba and Jamil Ragep in
particular, and the second by Fuat Sezgin; for references and discussion see ibid.
4. To wit, as “Powers of One”; see n. 2 above.

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:08 PS PAGE 90

 Melvin-Koushki  Afterword 91

historical development of occult science in Islam (and Judaism by extension)

over the millennium of Western intellectual history covered by our authors,
and into which their articles slot quite nicely.
Based on the first survey of the Islamic encyclopedic tradition from the
tenth to the seventeenth century, with emphasis on Persian classifications of
the sciences (sg. tas.nı̄f al-ulūm), I there demonstrate the ascent to philosophi-
cally and sociopolitically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ulūm
gharı̄ba) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Most significantly, in
Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning in the twelfth
century, certain occult sciences—astrology, lettrism, and geomancy—were
gradually but definitively shifted from the natural-philosophical to the math-
ematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the
face of four centuries of anti-occultism polemic. At the same time, they
were increasingly reclassified as sciences of sacral power (walāya), the contest
for which drove early modern Islamic imperial ideology, which alone
explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the
Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millen-
nium (1592 CE). I argue that the sanctification, de-esotericization, and then
mathematicalization-Neopythagoreanization of occultism generally and lettrism
specifically in thirteenth to fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt and Ilkhanid-
Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical
context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the
members of the Samarkand Observatory in the fifteenth century and the
resurgence of Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in
the sixteenth and seventeenth—processes which have heretofore been
studied in atomistic isolation and, in accordance with positivist-religionist
intellectual-historiographical orthodoxy, consistently stripped of their
occult-scientific valency.5
Lettrism, Hebrew kabbalah’s coeval Arabic twin, is the golden thread that
runs throughout this new narrative and gives it epistemological coherence.6

5. On occult science as the primary mode of philosophical praxis in the early

modern Persianate world see e.g. my “World as (Arabic) Text: The Neopythagorea-
nization of Philosophy in Safavid Iran,” in Sajjad Rizvi, ed., Philosophy and the Intellec-
tual Life in Shı̄ı̄ Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
6. Among the occult sciences that became permanently intertwined with Islamic
culture from its very inception, particularly in early Shii circles, it is the science of
letters (ilm al-h.urūf ), or lettrism, that underwent the most complex evolution. Most
significantly, it eventually emerged as the most Islamic of all the occult sciences despite
its explicitly late antique, non-Islamic parentage—this due to its reformulation in the
early thirteenth century by Ibn Arabı̄ and al-Būnı̄ in particular, as discussed by Gardi-
ner in his article in this special issue. Conceptually, as an umbrella science, lettrism

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:09 PS PAGE 91

92 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Spring 2017

In Islam and Judaism alike, lettrism and kabbalah respectively functioned as

the primary means of Islamicizing and Judaicizing the Hellenic heritage of late
antiquity in general and Neopythagorean-Neoplatonic philosophy-science,
especially occult science, in particular.7 That is to say, the reinterpretation of
first the Torah and then the Quran in Neopythagorean-gnostic mode ren-
dered the Hebrew or Arabic letters of scripture cosmogonic and their totality
the matrix of creation; and the divines that mapped this physics-metaphysics
onto the preeminent Hellenic occult science, astrology, thereby rendered it

encompasses the two modes of applied occultism as a whole in its basic division into
letter magic (sı̄miyā) on the one hand and letter divination (jafr) on the other. Letter-
magical techniques include most prominently the construction of talismans (sg.
.tilasm), whose engine is usually a magic square (wafq al-adād), to be populated with
letters or numbers relevant to the operation at hand; these are designed to harness the
specific letter-numerical virtues of personal names, whether of humans, jinn, or
angels, phrases or quranic passages, or one or more of the names of God. (The latter
operation is a typical example of the Sufi-occultist practice of “assuming the attributes
of God” or theomimesis (takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh)—hence the divine names as a major
focus of lettrism, often termed for that reason ilm al-h.urūf wa-l-asmā,” “the science
of letters and names,” or even simply “ilm al-asmā,” “the science of names.”) Letter
divination, for its part, includes most prominently the construction of a comprehen-
sive prognosticon (jafr jāmi), a 784-page text containing every possible permutation
of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. From such a prognosticon may be derived the
name of every thing or being that has ever existed or will ever exist, every name of
God in every language, and the knowledge of past, present, and future events—
especially political events—to the end of time. This divinatory aspect of lettrism is
associated in the first place with both the House of the Prophet and the mysterious
separated sura-initial letters in the Quran (muqat..taāt), similarly held to contain com-
prehensive predictive power, and to have inspired the basic lettrist technique of taksı̄r,
separating the letters of words or names for the purposes of permutation (cf. the sister
kabbalist techniques of gematria and temurah). Most letter-magical and letter-divinatory
operations are profoundly astrological in orientation, moreover; careful attention to
celestial configurations is essential for the success of any operation, and letter magic
often involves the harnessing of planetary spirits (taskhı̄r al-kawākib), together with
angels and jinn. Fasting, a vegetarian diet, seclusion, and maintenance of a state of
ritual purity are also regularly identified as conditions of practice in manuals on these
subjects. For references and a brief overview of lettrism’s historical development see
Matthew Melvin-Koushki and James Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Cen-
tral Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,” Studia
Islamica 111/2 (2016): 231–84, 247–63.
7. On the late antique Christianization of the same see e.g. Joel Kalvesmaki, The
Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity (Washing-
ton, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013); on subsequent Jewish receptions see
e.g. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Studies in Medieval Hebrew Pythagoreanism: Translations
and Notes to Nicomachus; Arithmological Texts,” Micrologus 9 (2001): 219–36.

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:09 PS PAGE 92

 Melvin-Koushki  Afterword 93

and its magical-mantic applications theologically valid within a scripturalist

Judeo-Islamic framework. The sanctification of occultism is thus a process
central to Islamic and Judeo-Islamic intellectual and cultural history,
including in the first place history of science; any historiography that
ignores or dismisses it as simple mystification, that is, as religion—as most have
to date—, remains ensorcelled by that facile and flatly ahistorical binary
whereby philosopher-scientists and theologian-traditionists stand eternally
opposed.8
Equally pernicious is the dominant tendency in the literature to divorce
Judaism from Islam on precisely this point. Thus kabbalah studies, single-
handedly founded by the committed religionist Gershom Scholem (d.
1982) in the middle decades of the twentieth century, has burgeoned as an
academic industry in its own right, and now boasts numerous book series
and several journals dedicated to the subject; but its equally worthy cog-
nate, lettrism studies, is formally nonexistent—despite the fact that far more
lettrist texts have come down to us than kabbalist. The institutionalized
erasure of lettrism from Western intellectual and cultural history aside,
moreover, it is only in its early modern Christian appropriation that kabba-
lah has merited investigation by historians of science. These astonishing
imbalances in the literature are natural products precisely of the religionist
and indeed Eurocentric tenor that dominated kabbalah studies from its incep-
tion, which as a consequence is still reflexively resistant to treating Judaism
and Islam, kabbalah and lettrism, as the religiocultural unit they historically
are—and congenitally unable to adequately address their pivotal impor-
tance to history of philosophy-science. A growing number of kabbalah
scholars, to be sure, including in the first place the field’s current doyen
Moshe Idel, now acknowledge the historical inextricability of Jewish and
Islamic forms of mysticism.9 But Judaicists and Islamicists still rarely talk to

8. Exceptionally in the field, Robert G. Morrison’s Islam and Science: The Intellec-
tual Career of Niz.ām al-Dı̄n Nı̄sābūrı̄ (New York: Routledge, 2007) avoids just this
trap: it treats the astronomical, astrological, exegetical, legal, theological, and Sufi
commitments of its fourteenth-century Ilkhanid scholar as being of an epistemologi-
cally integrated piece.
9. As Idel has flatly declared, “Muslim culture is the primary source of influence
upon Jewish mysticism” (“Jewish Mysticism and Muslim Mysticism,” Mah.anayyim 1
[1991]: 28–33, 33). For a survey of recent efforts in this direction see Ronald C.
Kiener, “Jewish Mysticism in the Lands of the Ishmaelites,” in Michael M. Laskier
and Yaacov Lev, eds., The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and
Cultural Dimensions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 146–67; and for
examples of this new comparative turn see e.g. Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Sefer
Yes.irah and Early Islam,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 3 (1993): 1–30; Gil

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:10 PS PAGE 93

94 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Spring 2017

one another;10 and even when they do, the methodological misprision at issue
is usually merely compounded: for both camps persist in wholly disappear-
ing lettrism-kabbalah—that discrete yet universal natural-mathematical-
scripturalist occult science—into the catchall categories of mysticism and
esotericism, the dumping grounds where science goes to die. Islamic and
Judeo-Islamic occultism studies thus remains an Oriental wilderness in which
few voices cry.
The task now most pressing is therefore to both marry astrology to lettrism
and lettrism to kabbalah, and to free these sciences from the tenacious
clutches of positivism, religionism, and Eurocentrism alike—as this special
issue effectively does.
Here auspiciously conjuncted, the articles by Marla Segol and Noah Gardi-
ner demonstrate the Judaicization and Islamicization of Hellenic natural phi-
losophy, epitomized by astrology, by means of kabbalah and lettrism
respectively, allowing for the mainstream sidestepping of traditionist theolog-
ical critiques common to the two communities of faith. Segol opens the
narrative with her survey of four distinct approaches, two pre-Islamic and
two Judeo-Islamic, to the naturalization of the foreign science of astrology
within Jewish religious-scholarly discourse; most significantly, these ap-
proaches were largely pegged to the Sefer Yes.irah, the earliest extant text of
kabbalah—a product of the same late antique Near Eastern milieu that gave
birth to Islam, and Islamic occultism, itself—,11 and by the tenth century
fully incorporated Islamic dialectical theology (kalām).12 Gardiner, for his part,
taking as primary point of theoretical reference the work of Moshe Halbertal

Anidjar, “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Michael Ebstein and Sara Sviri, “The
So-Called Risālat al-H . urūf (Epistle on Letters) Ascribed to Sahl al-Tustarı̄ and Letter
Mysticism in al-Andalus,” Journal Asiatique 299 (2011): 213–70. These aside, how-
ever, the comparative focus in most such studies is on the far more diffuse categories
of Sufism, Ismailism, or even esotericism, not on lettrism—a discrete occult science
and kabbalah’s exact cognate—as such.
10. On this obstacle and others to the comparative study of Judeo-Islamic and
Islamic mysticism see Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn
Masarra, Ibn al-Arabı̄ and the Ismāı̄lı̄ Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 16–21.
11. As Steven Wasserstom has convincingly hypothesized, “it was directly out of
the ‘creative symbiosis’ of Jewish and early Islamicate occult sciences, especially from
those favored by gnosticizing intellectuals, that [the Sefer Yes.irah] emerged into the
light of historical day” (“Sefer Yes.irah and Early Islam,” 29).
12. For more on this theme see her Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The
Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2012).

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:11 PS PAGE 94

 Melvin-Koushki  Afterword 95

on kabbalah, examines the development of a sanctified astral-letter magic in early

thirteenth-century Ifriqiya and Egypt as emblematic of the esotericist turn then
sweeping the Islamic and Judeo-Islamic Mediterranean zone; the great bur-
geoning of lettrism-kabbalah that drove this turn stands as culmination of the
long and rampantly multivocal historical process whereby the occult-
scientific legacy of late antiquity was naturalized by Jewish and Muslim schol-
ars.13 Lettrism-kabbalah and astrology, Hellenic and Abrahamic in equal
measure and as discrete sciences now effectively married, would enjoy main-
stream status among scholarly elites thenceforth—as well as a massive increase
in patronage by ruling elites for purposes expressly imperialist.14
Ahmet Tunç Şen’s investigation of a heretofore unexamined Ottoman
treatise on talismans—routinely defined in Arabo-Persian classifications of
the sciences as astrological-lettrist devices marrying celestial influences to terres-
trial objects—addresses this last development, definitive of early modern Per-
sianate high culture, by bringing out the specifically natural-philosophical and
political applications of our two conjoined occult sciences in the context of
Ottoman scholarship and its royal patronage on the one hand and the con-
struction of new Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic universalist imperial ideolo-
gies on the other.15 This is an intervention equally crucial: Şen thereby

13. While his article in this volume focuses exclusively on lettrism’s sanctification
and esotericization by al-Būnı̄ and the esotericist reading communities that formed
around the Sufi-occultist’s works, Gardiner has elsewhere discussed its equally
epochal de-esotericization in the late Mamluk Cairene context (“Esotericism in a
Manuscript Culture: Ah.mad al-Būnı̄ and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period”
[Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2014]). The latter process represents the point
of departure for my own work on early modern Islamic occultism, equal parts natu-
ral-philosophical, mathematical and sanctified, and wholly intellectually and politi-
cally mainstream.
14. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, the early fifteenth century saw the formu-
lation by scholar-ideologues of a distinctive and unprecedented dual astrological-lettrist
Timurid imperial platform, which platform served as model for the great successor
states of the Persianate world, Aqquyunlu, Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman, through at
least the seventeenth century (Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate
Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in Armando Salvatore, Roberto
Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi, eds., The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam [Malden, Mass.:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2017]).
15. For more on both themes see e.g. our forthcoming co-authored case study
“Divining Chaldiran: Ottoman Deployments of Astrology, Lettrism and Geomancy
in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict”; Ahmet Tunç Şen, “Astrology in the Service of
the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court, 1450s–
1550s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2016); Cornell H. Fleischer, “Ancient
Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:11 PS PAGE 95

96 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Spring 2017

supplies both the sociopolitical and the history of science frameworks that
must be embraced going forward if the field as a whole is to transcend the
positivist-religionist binary that has so badly warped it, rendering the histori-
cal theory and praxis of Islamic and Judeo-Islamic occultism all but illegible.
But what of Arabic astrology in its own right? No characterization of the
science in the premodern Islamic world can be complete without a discussion
of its most influential theorist: Abū Mashar Balkhı̄ (d. 886). This ex-
traditionist and protégé of Islam’s first philosopher, al-Kindı̄ (d. 873), was
responsible for reformulating Hellenic astrology in strictly Aristotelian terms
as core and culmination of natural philosophy as a whole; this reformulation
in turn became standard in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholarship
through the early modern period, and indeed the primary vector by which
Aristotelianism as such was introduced to Europe. Arabic astrology, quite
simply, and by extension Hebrew and Latin, was Abū Masharian; and
Arabic-Hebrew-Latin natural philosophy was heavily astrological. Yet the
Aristotelian tenor of Abū Masharian astrology was subsumed by the defini-
tive Neopythagorean turn in the Islamic heartlands from the early fifteenth cen-
tury onward—a turn which emboldened Timurid-Safavid astronomers to
dispense with Aristotelian physics,16 and whose engine and index was pre-
cisely the freshly sanctified, de-esotericized, and mathematicalized form of
lettrism discussed above. To supply this lacuna, I therefore refer the reader to
my review essay immediately following in this volume, on Liana Saif ’s The
Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, which discusses the recep-
tions and transformations of Abū Masharian astrology in particular in the
Islamo-Christian world; it therefore serves to complete the new narrative so
bracingly put forward by Segol, Gardiner, and Şen by widening their analyti-
cal aperture to include medieval and early modern Christendom, where intel-
lectual developments similarly ran curiously parallel.
As our four contributions conclusively show, in sum, a focus on lettrism-
kabbalah is the most efficient means of exploding the science-magic-religion
triad hobbling the historiography of Western astrology, on the one hand, and
of annulling the illegitimate intellectual-historiographical divorce of Judaism
from Islam and Islam from Christianity, on the other—for this occult science

Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Massoumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (London:

Thames & Hudson, 2009), 232–43, 329–30; and my forthcoming The Occult Science
of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran.
16. On this de-Aristotelianization of Arabic astronomy see in particular F. Jamil
Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on
Science,” Osiris 16 (2001): 49–71.

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:12 PS PAGE 96

 Melvin-Koushki  Afterword 97

was long feted by its scholarly exponents as the quintessence of Hellenic-

Abrahamic physics-metaphysics, and with astrology (and geomancy, aka “ter-
restrial astrology”) a primary prop to early modern Islamic millenarian
empire.17 Premodern Muslim, Jewish, and Christian lettrist-kabbalists thus
roundly embraced the dictum postmodernly reiterated by Burroughs: language
—Arabic-Hebrew letter-number—indeed hails from heaven, a viral astral-
magical means of decoding, and recoding, the world.

17. So I argue in “Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Meth-

ods of Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism,” Medieval History Journal 19 (2016):
142–50.

................. 19013$ $CH6 03-27-17 12:06:13 PS PAGE 97